As I write this, it's the morning of June 5th, 1981. A few people scattered
across the US are waking up, going in to work, sitting down at their terminal
with a coffee, and reading Usenet. Usenet is only getting a trickle of posts
each day -- it's still in that period where it's easy to read every message
posted to it.

Many things lie in Usenet's future. It's still running A-News,
which doesn't even have a real From header yet. Later this year it will switch
over to B-News, and volume will begin to increase. In 1987
there will be The great renaming. And of course in 1994,
the first spam will be posted to Usenet.

a ten year real-time historical exhibit

It's Usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago. Planned to be
available for the next ten years, unless I run out of inodes (again).

If you missed it the first time around, this is your chance to follow
Usenet's flowering.

made possible by

Henry Spencer at the University of Toronto, Department of Zoology,
who archived Usenet. Back when it was really uncool and really expensive.
Our view onto Usenet is thus slightly centric to Canada and Zoology,
but that's ok.

Many who worked to rescue data off the tapes. Including from the deleted
stuff at the ends.

Rich Skrenta, who somehow got a copy of the archive out from under the
Google borg. Although one of the tar files is truncated. Just saying.

The creator of Telehack, who pointed me in
the right direction, ending my multi-year quest to find the archive.
And if you think this is neat, Telehack will blow you away.

The developers of Haskell, which enabled me to whip up a B-News
to C-News converter, a custom uucp, date parsers for every crazy date
format ever used on Usenet, and suitible queue data structures
in a rock solid, maintainable way, in 500 lines of code written over
12 hours. When I realized I also needed an A-News to B-News converter,
I knew it was worth it to have done things right, because that took
only 43 more lines, and worked 100% on the first run!
My code repository for olduse.net is here.

PS: You can post to olduse.net, but it won't show up for at least 30 years. :)